A single drawing from a 94-year-old scientific paper has revived interest in one of the more roundabout ways a spider preps its dinner. First swathe a fruit fly or other tidbit of prey in silk. Then throw up toxins all over it.
“I was like … what are you talking about?” says evolutionary biologist Giulia Zancolli of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland as she remembers the moment she read this detail when reviewing another lab’s scientific paper for possible publication in a journal. Tracing back the references, she eventually ended up with a drawing from a 1931 paper. “That was the only evidence we had.”